ENTERTAIN OR DIE?

The best way to experience our brand spanking new monthly podcast is to immediately stop reading this and hit play below, writes BBH Editorial Director Richard Cable. If you’d like to know a little more before you commit, read on.

Today we are the launching the new BBH Labs podcast. Each episode we’ll be asking a different, burning question about the future of marketing and inviting interesting people with strong opinions to answer it. While some of those people will be from BBH, we’ll also be hearing from a wide range of friends, acquaintances and total strangers we’ve ruthlessly persuaded to talk to us because we believe they have something important to say.

What we hope all our contributors bring you is different thinking. Smart, restless, awkward, combative, one-step-beyond type thinking. The sort of stuff you wish you’d thought of, only now you don’t have to. There will be disagreements. There will be controversy. Our ambition is resolutely editorial. We have no intention of inflicting another unwanted download of agency puffery on the world, so please see this as an open invitation to challenge, debate and build freely on the ideas you find here.

We launch with ‘Entertain or Die?’, an episode about the decline of interruptive marketing and the much anticipated rise of entertainment a.k.a. branded content as an alternative. It’s fair to say that the relationship between brands and entertainment hasn’t always been an easy or successful one. We’re asking why brands should continue to invest and what needs to change for them to create truly effective entertainment. Going deep with fresh perspectives are: from Hollywood, global ECD Pelle Sjoenell, head of strategy Agathe Guerrier and head of entertainment William Swann; and from London, ECD Anthony Austin and strategy director Melanie Arrow.

Let us know what you think, and if you have ideas or suggestions for future episodes, we’d love to hear from you. You can find us on Twitter @bbhlabs or leave a response in the comments below and we’ll get back to you.